A blog about the positive interactions between science and faith.

Last month, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Antony Hewish spoke at the Faraday Institute on ‘My Life in Science and Religion – A Personal Story’. Professor Hewish described himself as more of a practical experimentalist than a philosopher or mathematician, and his life story certainly reflects that – though I think he understates his own intellect in a very Cambridge way. He clearly enjoyed his work in radio astronomy very much, and his insights into the compatibility of science and faith are very interesting.

Antony Hewish was the youngest of three boys, and thanks to their parents’ open-mindedness, they created a workshop in the family home – over the bank that their father managed. Hewish’s early experiments with electricity fused the lights of not only the whole house but those of the bank below! He left school in 1942 with reasonable enough grades to get him into Cambridge, but only if he studied ‘physics with radio’ – thanks to wartime demands for radio engineers. After spending most of his first year rowing, Hewish failed to pass to the next year and was sent to the Royal aircraft establishment to work on development of radio systems. After a few months he went to Malvern to work on radar jamming systems. Here he learned a good deal more about electronics, and was even allowed on some test flights to try out the equipment.

In 1946 Hewish was able to return to Cambridge to complete his studies, and this time he worked hard. He got a better degree than his tutors expected, and was accepted as a PhD candidate in Physics. Martin Ryle had also been working on radio during the war, and was now running a research group at the Cavendish laboratory looking at the behaviour of radio waves in the upper atmosphere. Hewish applied to work with Ryle, and so joined a group that was to become famous for starting modern observational cosmology on its course.

Ryle’s team worked hard to create huge arrays of radio antennae, building and operating them by hand. Hewish enjoyed the camaraderie of teamwork, but also managed to establish his own area of research. His PhD thesis was on the twinkling of galaxies caused by charged clouds of particles high in the ionosphere. Even as a PhD student Hewish felt the privilege of discovery. He remembers cycling back home past the rugby ground after measuring the speed of ionic clouds over the ground for the first time. He was sampling data at greater heights than anyone before, and at that moment was the only one who knew what was happening in those atmospheric layers. He went on to develop an interest in quasars, and developed his own antenna array to detect them. It was with this antenna that he and his research student Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars – the discovery that led to his Nobel Prize.

As a schoolboy Hewish went to chapel every day and twice on Sundays, but he didn’t feel very ‘religious’. His first spiritual experience was not in church, but on the golf course. One of his brothers was interested in model aircraft, so Hewish was always roped in as an assistant to help fly them. They would often go out early in the morning to get the right conditions for flying, and on one beautiful day, he had a feeling that he described as ‘the presence of a benevolent power behind the universe’. Only later did he learn the word ‘numinous’ from the theologian Charles Raven – but that is what he experienced.

Hewish never experienced any complications in being a physicist and a Christian. He finished his seminar by saying that a number of people regard science and faith as complementary, but he would take it further and say that science is actually a great help to understanding religion. The concept of God is mysterious, particularly when he chooses to reveal himself through a man two thousand years ago. Even the most basic physics is similarly mysterious, but that doesn’t mean the physics is not right.

For example, a glass of water doesn’t seem at all mysterious. Water contains a lot of hydrogen – the simplest element. Quantum physics tells us that an electron in orbit around a hydrogen atom is behaving in extremely strange ways, being affected by ‘virtual particles’. It’s hard to believe: common sense says that this behaviour cannot happen, but the measurements say that it does.

So for Hewish, physics helps him to get into the right frame of mind to realise that religious mysteries can exist and can be reasonable without defeating common sense. If matter even at its most basic level is more complex than you could ever dream, then we should not be afraid of mystery when it comes to God.

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One thought on “Antony Hewish: A Life in Science and Religion”

Elias C.February 20, 2013 / 11:26 pm

Science holds to evolution for lack of a more definitive alternative… It’s understandable I’ll give you, by default, to derive an origin of US such as evolution for lack of a more definitive alternative we could all clearly understand without contradicting science or reason, as ST. Augustine put it regarding a literal interpretation of a proclaimed testament… In truth, the ‘evolution’ of man is dissolved by the phenomenon of the entity of words itself. – Another time perhaps.

Dilemma, before billions could endure the belief of a ‘questioned’ testament as to the origin of our existence, we must ‘first know’ in our heart that the ‘source’ of this heard word is real or a reality… Otherwise, the validity of its truth is rendered void or vain… We have nothing that the ‘worlds’ view of understanding can clearly see as of yet with regard to a more definitive alternative. An evidential stalemate, from the layman to the scholar…

Please, bear with me. To have a shot at understanding this introduced reason of truth, let’s consider the widely accepted by science ‘impact theory’ as to the origin of our man named moon. It can be seen on a discovery channel video “the day the moon was gone”. The video in short shows the significance of the moon for sustaining life here on this ‘one and only’ planet we inhabit by supposing it vanished and the subsequent catastrophe in its disappearance and thus the explanation as to its origin. The Science community, accepts a mars size mass impacted this planet causing the coalescing of the subsequent debris forming our now orbiting moon, lastly the scientists go on to deduce, had the impact missed the planet or had not occurred complex life forms, specifically us, would not exist…

This now introduces ‘two new’ implications as to the planet and its inhabitance in addition to our previous understanding as to the origin of our existence – The Big Bangs universe, to our current planet and the eventual evolving of man to present day since Lemaitre and Darwin…

The first – In spite of the 14 billion years of the big bangs universe, ‘something else’ had to take place ‘inducing’ complex life form on this planet. Until or unless this impacting event occurred there would be no life, regardless of existing universe. With all material matter, protons, neutron, hydrogen gases etc. available, light years of existence was void producing no complex life, and had that random rock missed this random rock, who knows how many more billions of years the universe would still be dead or irrelevant to natural life…

The second implication – the impact caused a ‘divide’ to this single mass of molten rock, ‘resulting’ in two necessary orbiting masses, ‘creating’ a new life sustaining environment, unique to a void universe… I have not said or asserted anything; as you know, this is peer reviewed science…

However, I submit; this life sustaining ‘dividing event’ was testified to and identified by name, thousands of years ago by the ‘literal account’ of Genesis 1, before it was ‘falsely interpreted’ an account as to the origin of the universe, that in fact, predates the literal life sustaining dividing event of this planet by some 10 billion years or so…

The testified literal account of this dividing event identified by name 9 times in the account alone was declared millenniums before the development and technology of modern science could prove or implicate such a dividing event of the planet to be literally true and thus ‘verifying’ the words of the ‘only source/creator’ who could have ‘known’ of such a creation to be factually true and none else…

Otherwise; the idea or notion of such a divide or detachment of anything ‘above’ the stand point of view from earth, to anyone born of a woman on this planet ‘thereafter’, would not have been possible for them to imaging or conceive ‘without’ the testament itself, with us from its foundation…

Lastly; our problem is evidently this – The genesis account proclaiming a ‘literal’ dividing event, identified by name 9 times in the account of the event alone, is ‘unknown to bear record’ of the two introduced scientific implications of a dividing event theory – due to the fact that the worlds view of understanding and/or belief, is ‘only’ aware of an ‘invalidating interpretation’ of a creation account as to the origin of the universe. Thus, rendering the belief held and the account itself false, with no definitive alternative…

To restore the false belief held of an ‘accused’ invalidating interpreted account as to the origin of the universe – (Augustine to Hawking)

Clearly see the newly ‘revealed’ scientific implications that account for a ‘literal dividing event’ of this planet that was ever since then called earth to justify the truth of its Creators very word and declares the glory of his hands work without contradicting science or reason and thus verifying the spirit of its truth in your heart, empowering you to with calm endure, even unto the end…